I have recently become a big fan of the selective color adjustment in photoshop. Sometimes when working on an image when I want to take it a bit away from the “reality” of colors that we see on a daily basis, I will do some adjustments to the image on a non-destructive selective color layer.
Below is an example of a recent beauty image I created of Madeline. She is a model here in NYC with Muse Models. I only had about 30 mins to do this shoot once hair and makeup did their magic. I photographed two models for a beauty shoot in the morning before my afternoon commercial lookbook shoot.

In these series of images below I have first the final retouched, color adjusted image with smoke added. This is the final image. I shot this with a hasselblad h4d 50 megapixel camera so there is a lot of detail in the actual image that may not show up here on the web.

FINAL RETOUCHED/ADJUSTED IMAGE WITH SELECTIVE COLOR & SMOKE -

Now I will take you thru the stages to get to this final image.

I sent the raw unadjusted image to my retoucher Pablo in Spain. I used to do all my own retouching, but just find it too time consuming. I love creating art in photoshop, but I have teamed up with another artist. I trust his work, so this frees me to focus on shooting more and sharing my the process of my work thru this blog “creative space”. I am arranging now to have Pablo join me from Spain to share his photoshop “magic”. He has amazing techniques that he will be sharing with the students who sign up for my 2day master class in April in NYC. The images below are to show you the retouching of the skin that Pablo did.

RETOUCHING BEFORE AND AFTER -

Madeline has great skin, and the broncolor light I used (with para 88 modifier) has a very silkening effect on the skin, but digital photography tends to show too much reality, so retouching is pretty important to clean the skin, remove all the stray hairs and give the image a special polish.

After I received the retouched image back from Pablo, I added my own quick color treatment. I created a “selective color adjustment” in photoshop to give it a more interesting jeweled color tone. See below.

RETOUCHED IMAGE (Left), Added SELECTIVE COLOR ADJUSTMENT (Right) -

I have a behind the scenes video that Adam (my amazing video man) and I are working on now that will show the exact lighting tools used to create this shot, plus several other lighting setups for doing beauty shoots. (check back later this week to watch me demonstrate the lighting for shooting beauty!)

The next step for me after I did this tone was to ask Pablo to add some smoke coming from the model’s lips for a graphic visual effect. And there you have it!

The Makeup – For this shoot I worked with nyc makeup artist Tiffany Stout. Her and I just recently started working together and I must say that I really enjoy her energy on set. I get hundreds of requests from different hair and makeup artists to work together. When my regular team is booked doing other work, I will “test” someone new. I say test because it is not always just someone’s talent that I look for when working together, but also, and as important to me: do I enjoy working with this person? do they bring a positive energy to the set? are they a diva or are they likable and treat the model and others on set well? and are they bringing creativity to their work? The last one here is really important because I do not like to follow what everyone else is doing, but rather try and create something new. If I work with others who feel the same and can bring something new to the table, then it helps my work evolve as well.